Microsoft has released a beta version of a toolkit that lets you create Windows Phone apps that can connect to Amazon Web Services.

The announcement of the beta in the Interoperability blog gives the reason for the toolkit as being that developers want to have choice and be able to reuse their assets and skills when creating cloud-connected mobile applications.

The toolkit makes the Amazon S3, SimpleDB, and SQS Cloud Services directly available to Windows Phone 7 Developers via C# APIs and the intended audience isn’t Windows Phone developers moving away from Azure (perish the thought), but developers who’ve been creating apps against AWS for technologies such as Android or iOS. Even so it represents the dilemma that Microsoft has - support other cloud architectures or promote only Azure.

As well as a Getting Started Guide downloadable as a pdf, there are also Channel 9 videos for Getting Started, and sample walkthoughs for each of S3, Simple DB and SQS.

Jean Paoli, General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, said:

“The release of the Windows Phone Toolkit for AWS Beta proves that Microsoft’s goal of building a Cloud-friendly phone is true across vendor boundaries. It literally takes minutes to create a Cloud-ready application in C# with this toolkit. We look forward to this toolkit eventually resulting in many more great apps in the rapidly growing Windows Phone marketplace.”

While the official reasoning behind the beta is cross-boundary friendly helpfulness, the reality is that Microsoft can’t really afford to ignore all the mobile phone apps that have already been created and hosted on Amazon for iPhone and Android. If a few of you could see your way clear to porting those apps to run on Windows Phone, Microsoft would really be very, very grateful.